The Future of Backup and Recovery

There has been an expanding growth in the need for provision of security features for data, especially now that data is getting stored and shared on the cloud. This market is growing tremendously providing services to the data archiving segment which includes companies who store a great deal of sensitive and confidential information on their computer systems. The need for protecting such data is vital and must not be lost or accessed by data thieves and hackers. Malicious use of company data can cause companies to suffer devastating losses in financial terms, reputation, and so many other facets of doing business. The question then becomes: why retain such a massive volume of information whereas it would be easier to do away with the information (managing all the data invokes cost implications). However, companies have to comply with international standards of conduct which may demand that data is kept at least for a prescribed duration of time. This is where the need for backup and recovery services comes in: technological advancements make it easier to manage loads of data that is stored and protected for increasingly longer durations.

Therefore, backup and recovery services have become an absolute necessity when it comes to the management of data. While many people would naturally want to avoid the likelihood of having data get lost or corrupted, they tend to underestimate the possibility of it happening. Backup and recovery is the most efficient way to approach data management, certainly preferable to spending valuable time and resources to try and recover lost data manually. Proactive backup and recovery services are provided at a small annual cost that is definitely unrivaled by what a company or individual may have to incur finding a means to reconstruct and recover data that has already been lost or corrupted. There are 3 major backup and recovery options: 1) offline backup, in which the process to transfer data to a totally different location other than the network used is both effortful and time-consuming; 2) online backup which is often directly synced to the company’s network, allows for fast and easy access to data, and recent additions are backed up consistently; and 3) the near line backup, which is a combination of offline and online data backup and recovery. It is less expensive but slower than online backup.

Moving away from the traditional, agent-based types of backup and recovery, the continued growth in backup and recovery needs suggests that the future of backup and recovery should address many issues, including data on the cloud. There has been great news filtering in regards to the cloud backups. This is perhaps the most important part of the ongoing discussion concerning the future of backup and recovery since the trend in the world today involves virtualization of many aspects of data storage. Propositions for features that future backup and recovery should provide are numerous. With virtualization of many operations on servers and desktops, backups will be required to be hypervisors, constantly aware of the data and environment to be supported and duplicated. This in effect will go towards the backing up environments such as the VMware, HyperV and the XenServer just as they are and never as if they were physical servers. Companies and organizations will require the ability to administer, stipulate, monitor, and protect critical applications irrespective of whether within the cloud, physical servers, virtual machines, and any combinations used.

Future backup and recovery has been envisioned to provide a user interface that is able to simplify application of the service but at the same time achieve a complexity of task. Future backup and recovery must avail all applications to the user, and provide auto discovery of tasks and their interdependency. Applications will need to be sorted out depending on which are more critical. Some tasks are often labeled mission-critical, while others are business critical among other levels. The continued movement towards cloud services sees the need for an all-inclusive backup technology that will achieve full recovery of features and data from the computer, as well as Smartphones and tablets which are now present in businesses.

In addition, cloud computing requires backups that address the multi-tenant environment which includes the physical servers and the virtual servers. The requirement for definitive recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives should also be incorporated for cloud backups. The other feature that future backup and recovery should have is the ability to backup and recover data from various online cloud platforms and even emails. Lastly, B&R plans should offer assurance for all involved in these processes from the system administrators to company executives and owners. Future data recovery plans should even suggest the best method to go about securing data. The options available would range from the typical backups to disks, cloud backup, application specific protection, the use of snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replications of data, and continuous data application. Such features will provide monitoring of hardware failure and problems of the operating system and application layers. Such a tool would be useful for critical systems and applications DR, local recovery, computer backup for company networks and systems, and lastly, the remote backup and recovery of office data.

There has been continuous research and development regarding future backup and recovery plans that will be launched, as well as the scope to which data backup and recovery will be enhanced commensurate with trends in the IT world, specifically those concerned with data.